


Two Psychiatrist Appointments in Waupan, Wisconsin

by lapsi



Series: Case-By-Case [4]
Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Health Issues, Prison, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:08:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27630481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapsi/pseuds/lapsi
Summary: This is a pre-series snippet set in 1970.Holden is believed for the very first time.
Series: Case-By-Case [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1141013
Comments: 19
Kudos: 38





	Two Psychiatrist Appointments in Waupan, Wisconsin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VivaRocksteady](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VivaRocksteady/gifts).



> happy birthday, here's the worst thing in the world

“Hello, Ford.”  
  
Holden bows his head a fraction. “Doctor.”  
  
Doctor Lizbon’s office is quieter than most of Dodge, which would be reason enough to attend the appointments even if they weren’t mandated. The room is more pleasant than the main block in other ways, too: it doesn’t smell of piss and stale body odour, and is far more visually appealing than the endless, fluro-lit cubic cells and tight corridors. The room has the high ceilings and mint tiles and deathly historical ambience of the old mental hospital that Dodge once was. 

Before a state-wide shortage of prison space led to the hasty conversion to a maximum security prison, Dodge Correctional Facility had been Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The medical facilities and contracted, specialized staff led to a roughshod integration of the lunatics and the new, more wilfully violent arrivals. Holden is, technically, in the former category; he was found not guilty by reasons of insanity, and committed to a secure institution until such time that the Court may be convinced of his capacity to safely reintegrate into society. Id est, a life sentence. Perhaps if he lied his way through a more thorough confession, played up his delusional state of mind at the time of the murders, there would be some slim hope of release at the age of sixty or seventy. Three factors stop him from doing that: firstly, Holden doesn’t expect to survive until he’s thirty (much less than that, if he has any say in the matter); secondly, it would erase whatever minuscule chance there is of the real killer someday being brought to justice; lastly, and most significantly, Holden doesn’t have enough accurate details to play the role of the unreserved repenter. What the parole board really want from him is the location of the three missing girls. If Holden had figured that out, he’d have caught the murderers himself, and would have never been imprisoned in the first place.  
  
The half of the room reserved for patients, or prisoners, is a bare wooden chair, a posted guard, a barred, glass-brick window throwing in diffused grey light. Lizbon’s half of the room is a walled-off wonderland of civilian decor: shelves of fascinating manuals that Holden isn’t allowed to borrow, an oil painting of an aspen tree, a tea pot and kettle on a sink that seems to serve as an improvised kitchenette. Still unavoidably within a prison: the window to Doctor Lizbon has metal bars across it, and Holden’s record as a violent inmate means that he is always manacled for his sessions. Getting the shit kicked out of you by three other inmates while you lie curled in foetal position gets marked down as a “violent offence” on your disciplinary record. They also count suicide attempts as violence; while this classification certainly poses some fascinating philosophical questions about bodily sovereignty, it practically serves as just another black mark against Inmate 522.  
  
The guard seems to be watching closer than usual. Holden remembers with hideous (albeit psychosis-distorted) clarity the sensation of walking down a street and feeling a cruel inspection from every single pedestrian and driver, even the ones avoiding his eyes. Now, in prison, the surveillance is invariably actually occurring. It makes it much harder to track symptoms for Doctor Lizbon. The guard (an older man named Kinard, who Holden has a relatively favourable opinion of) is posted far enough away to miss the conversation, which is good, because Holden rarely has any utility for the twice a month psych appointments other than satisfying his desire for intelligent conversation.  
  
Lizbon is sitting on the other side of the barred window, a full desk of books and paperwork and filing baskets before her. She invariably has cut flowers near the window, which Holden is a little embarrassed to look forward to the sight and smell of. Doctor Lizbon, an extremely well-read clinical psychiatrist, can’t be older than forty for all her qualifications. She’s small-boned and dresses in a gamine, minimalistic style that seems designed to provoke sexual disinterest from the more base inmates she treats. Her black hair is curled back into a hairclip, and the high neckline of her blue shirt is decorated with structured folds of fabric. The sleekness has Holden wishing he could at least find a uniform that fits better, a sharper razor to shave with, a real barber to cut his hair. He’d like to appear respectable before this sort of woman.  
  
Lizbon doesn’t speak beyond the initial greeting; procedural check-ups or mandated testing tends to pre-empt unstructured conversation.  
  
Holden smiles cautiously, scooting his chair closer to the window. “Where were we? ...pattern seeking, I think. Behavioural regulation that benefits wild animals, who need to recognise the shape of prey or predator, or the smell and sound of family. Rendered more complex by the neural complication involved in the human brain. You were telling me about theories of-- Doctor, is everything alright?” he asks, finding his conversational partner non-participant.  
  
For a brief second, her dark brown eyes flick down. There’s a new feature to her crowded desk: a framed photograph of a young girl, with dark, frizzy curls. Not overly similar to Lizbon, with the freckles, the darker skin tone. Doctor Lizbon wears a ring; her husband is probably freckled, maybe black, judging by their daughter’s appearance. Displaying a photo of your child might draw out some personal engagement from the more reticent patients, but it might also incite horrific commentary. Especially your mixed race child. 

Stranger, still, to leave it on your desk in front of the notorious Madison Child Murderer.  
  
“Your daughter is--” Holden’s mouth dries as he tries to pick an adjective that won’t be tinged by his identity as an assumed pedophile. _Cute? No. Sweet? No. Pretty? Jesus--_ “Young.” He winces. “Not that the ages don’t align. You’re certainly old enough-- I mean, young enough--”  
  
“It’s not my daughter,” Doctor Lizbon interrupts.  
  
“...okay,” Holden says, teeth gritted. He wants to rationalise his atrophied social skills, but the hole is dug quite deep enough without reaching for the shovel again. He glances up at the clock. Vague curiosity about the new photo is not outweighed by his desire to continue last session’s conversation. Lizbon won’t want to talk about her family anyway, not with him. He backtracks to a safer, more interesting topic: “I was thinking about the discovery of chlorpromazine, that an anti-allergen was trialled as a surgical sedative. So, we’re talking about decreasing responses of some kind of neurochemical process inside the brain. The system that creates pattern recognition surely…” Holden trails off under a withering, wet glare.  
  
“It’s Missy Ruperts. She was the daughter of one of my oldest friends,” Doctor Lizbon tells him like she’s running short of air.  
  
Holden drums against the rough khaki uniform over a skimmed knee. He hasn’t seen photos of any of the four murdered children in a long time; he saw Missy Ruperts last in a court exhibit at his own trial. But he saw her again, and again, and again. The prosecutor kept bringing out the school photo. Every time, her mother would start crying. And every time that happened, Holden was reminded that the jury was going to throw him in jail for the rest of his life one way or another. That made Missy Ruperts’s grinning face unforgettable. “Missy Ruperts didn’t have freckles. Her hair was straight. I don’t know who that is--”  
  
“That’s Missy. I took the photo myself.”  
  
“Is this an exercise?” Holden asks, sitting back, growing cool. “I haven’t had visual hallucinations in awhile, if you’re trying to gauge whether you need to up my dosage. I _know_ that isn’t Missy Ruperts, and I--”  
  
“Shut up,” Lizbon snaps. She stands so fast that it’s almost violent. “Take Ford back to his cell,” she says, loud enough to pull the guard’s attention.  
  
“Doctor, what is this about?” Holden asks, standing too, as Lizbon hurries off toward a back door out of her office. “Doctor Lizbon? I’m happy to find a newspaper and--”  
  
He goes suddenly quiet when a rough hand grabs his collar from behind. “Did you say something to upset her?” the guard barks. The protectiveness is commendable, if not a little chauvinistic. His other hand hovers all of an inch from his baton.  
  
Holden tries to look as confused as he feels. He’s short of breath, though not out of fear. “I don’t know what I said to upset her.” He blinks. “Sir.”  
  
The guard glowers at him, then yanks him back towards the exit. A strange enough situation to spare Holden a backhand, though there’s no gentleness to the shoving march back towards the main block. Holden stumbles along in a daze, trying to reason out the interaction and avoid tripping over his own feet or the manacle chain with each push between his shoulder blades.

  
  
The cellblock is largely empty, which makes Holden uneasy. Rubbing his uncuffed wrists, trying to catch a warning shadow amongst the unoccupied cells, he beelines to his own cell. Bad things happen to him when he’s almost alone. He makes it to his bunk, and lies on his back trying to decide what the splotchy, stained concrete Rorschach overhead has to say about Lizbon’s behaviour. The concrete offers nothing profound. A relief to know his brain is so under-active under current medication regimens. Maybe if-- if he squints. He realizes he’s crying only when the unresolved patterns devolve into a wet and indiscernible blur. 

He doesn’t know why Lizbon felt safe. There was no reason to assume she saw any good in him. But he’d woken up last year, when he thought he wouldn’t (after he’d slashed open one wrist with a stolen razor and passed out before he could get to the other), and she’d been by his bedside even though she didn’t need to be. She’d calmed him before he could dislocate a shoulder trying to budge the restraints.  
  
She’d been a good doctor, that was all. But he must have been engaged in some subconscious self-delusion; if her very natural hatred of him had always been accepted, that conversation wouldn’t have felt like another toothbrush shiv to the guts.  
  
He doesn’t cry very hard, or for very long. He never had it in him. His half hour appointment was over in all of five minutes, so he has some time to compose himself before heading back to the workshop where he’s supposed to be lettering license plates.  
  
He keeps picturing the photo of, supposedly, Missy Ruperts. Doctor Lizbon had seemed genuinely distressed, and Holden can’t formulate any plausible reason for her to lie about it. No, it must be Missy. Missy’s mother was half-Jamaican-- or somewhere like that. Holden hadn’t focussed on that particular aspect of the unsolved crimes. These were stranger abductions, that was always obvious. The family wasn't relevant.  
  
The knowledge of Missy’s real appearance doesn’t help him solve the crime from his mercilessly uncushioned prison bunk. The session wasn’t completely unproductive; knowing that Lizbon hates him too helps him harden himself up to hope.  
  
If he hadn’t been foolish enough to hope in the first place, he wouldn’t be feeling this way now.

The appointments are once every two weeks, and his stress-triggered symptoms get worse every day he closes in on his next session with Doctor Lizbon. Murmured words that don’t make sense as he’s trying to sleep, paranoid suspicion of even Daniels-- though, with the awful smog of Largactil ruining his brain, Holden has the faculties to identify each new phenomena for the schizotypal thinking that it is.

The morning of his appointment he makes deliberate, prolonged eye contact with the aggression-prone Phillips in the pharmacy line. But solitary must be full, because his fresh black eye and busted hand doesn’t get him out of seeing Doctor Lizbon. Just another warning on his permanent record, more privileges revoked. Three o’clock approaches at a relentless pace. He could refuse to go, but it would be a de facto confirmation that he’s the Madison Child Murderer. He wants to show his face, uncowed, unashamed. Only, now the face he’s presenting is offset with bright red bruises and the occasional twitch. There’s no pride to be had in prison, he should have learned that by now.  
  
So, aching from his morning’s scuffle, chest tight as a straightjacket, he allows the manacles on his wrists and his ankles. He walks ahead of the escorting guard up the grand staircases and into the old hospital block. Like he’s walking back through the years into his own trial, and he hasn't figured out what to do differently on the re-run.  
  
He’d half-hoped Lizbon would have transferred him to another psych-- not that there’s many options in an under-funded state facility-- but there she is, in a black smock, arms folded severely.  
  
Holden walks very slowly to the chair, keeping the more injured side of his face turned from her. The chain between his ankles jangles on the tiles as he walks and sits. He can feel his jaw spasming from being clenched, but he can barely relax it enough to speak. “Doctor.”  
  
Lizbon doesn’t sit, doesn’t even return the greeting. “If you didn’t kill her, why confess?”  
  
“I don’t remember,” Holden says, trying not to sound petulant, failing.  
  
“Very convenient.”  
  
“No. It’s not. It’s extremely inconvenient. It’s true, and it’s a terrible excuse. If I’d been in sound enough mind to know how poorly amnesia would play in court, I would have picked a more compelling lie and stuck to it.”  
  
Lizbon is composed and unreadable, a sharp divergence from their last aborted session.  
  
Holden blinks several times, trying to see through a swelling left eyelid. “...I’ve wondered about it, of course. They could have threatened me. Tricked me into doing it, maybe convinced me I was going to smoke out the real criminal. Maybe I convinced myself of that without any help. I’ve seen the tape; I seemed extremely unaware of my surroundings.”  
  
Still, no reply.  
  
“Then again, when I’m unmedicated, I hear I have a very blunted affect,” Holden mutters.  
  
“That’s what your medical file says, yes.” She sits.  
  
Holden looks at the glass brick window. Closer to blue today. He tries to imagine what the sky looks like beyond, and for some reason that makes him feel like crying again.  
  
Doctor Lizbon sighs almost inaudibly. Then, “I looked up photographs of your trial. The photo you saw didn’t look like her. Her parents didn’t own a camera, so they only had one recent photo of her: her school photo. I don’t think I’d even developed this film yet, so I didn’t have this one to offer up. She had very curly hair, like her mother’s. The photographer made her tie it back. Freckles. She was covered in them. I don’t know why they airbrushed them out, it’s… horrible, really. To tell a five year old that the way she looks is a flaw to be erased.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Holden says, the words sharp-edged and scratchy on the way out.  
  
“I’m not saying I’m convinced. And I don’t want you telling me what you think sounds good. I want the truth, Holden.”  
  
Holden finally pulls his eyes back, to meet her steady stare. He can hear himself shaking, unconcealable while chained wrist and ankle. “I promise. I promise I’ll tell you the truth.”  
  
“It’s an empty,” says a half-sung voice behind him, that he’s almost certain isn’t real.  
  
He squeezes his bruised knuckles until there’s nothing else. Pain never dislodged symptoms, anyway. Still, it feels real. This conversation feels real. He’d know, wouldn’t he? With the Largactil.  
  
Lizbon is looking at him as if he’s a person. Holden had forgotten what it was like to be looked at as anything other than a child murderer. She leans over the white rhododendrons on her desk and so close to the barred window. “...okay, Holden. Tell me who you think killed Missy.” 


End file.
